What are some alternatives to Contentful?

Sanity is the alternative we recommend most. It gives you real-time collaboration, a customizable studio, and pay-as-you-go pricing that doesn't punish you for scaling. Storyblok is worth considering if your editors want a visual builder. We've migrated teams off Contentful to both, and Sanity consistently gets the best feedback from developers and content editors alike.

From Contentful to Hygraph

We are the Contentful to Hygraph migration experts

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Last verified: August 3, 2026

The process

How we migrate from Contentful to Hygraph

01
Access and gating audit
First we check the existing Contentful and see whether the data is clean enough to move straight over to Hygraph, and plan around any auth walls or bot protection in the way.
02
Rendering assessment and extraction
Then we work out how Contentful renders its pages and pull the content out, even without CMS access.
03
AI-assisted sanitization
Everything extracted runs through our sanitization pipeline, which flags slop, normalizes structure, and leaves us clean content to work with.
04
Content-model design with the client
Before anything moves, we agree the Hygraph content model with you, shaped around how your editors actually work.
05
Transform and soft-migrate
We transform the content to the agreed schema and run a full dry run, so mappings and edge cases prove out before production.
06
Execute the real migration
Once the dry run is clean, everything moves into Hygraph in one controlled cutover.
07
Redirect mapping and throttled sitemap submission
Every old URL gets mapped to its new home with the right redirect, so rankings and link equity survive the move.
08
Agentic-browser QA
Finally, automated browsers sweep the new site for data issues, design regressions, and missing SEO signals.
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Challenges with Contentful

Key pain points

Contentful is one of those platforms where the bill can catch you off guard. The free tier caps you at 25 content types and 100K API calls, and a single marketing site can blow past both without warning. The next step up is $300 a month, and enterprise pricing often lands in the $50K to $100K+ a year range.

The pattern teams keep hitting is the same: the jump is forced by one limit, not by needing the bigger feature set. The content type cap alone can push you onto a higher plan you don't otherwise need.

The other issue is that Contentful has strong opinions about how content should be modelled, and those opinions aren't always documented. Projects built without that knowledge tend to accumulate performance problems and awkward workarounds. Before writing Contentful off, speak to us, a lot of the pain we see is implementation, not platform.

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Pricing climbs fast

Contentful isn't a cheap CMS. Once you pass the free tier's content type or API call limit, you're on the $300/month Lite plan, and enterprise pricing often starts at $50K+ a year.

Complex for non-technical users

Marketers and editors may need a small learning curve before they feel at home. It’s powerful but not always plug-and-play.

Integration dependency

A lot of magic happens through third-party tools. Great for flexibility, but it does mean extra setup instead of getting everything out-of-the-box.

Limited native features

Contentful keeps the core CMS clean and minimal, but that also means more building and configuring to get advanced functionality.

Learning curve for new teams

If your team is moving from a traditional CMS, expect some onboarding time. Structured content is amazing but new for many.

Requires careful management

Because it’s so flexible, projects need good governance. Without it, content models can get messy and harder to maintain over time.

Benefits of Hygraph

Key advantages

Hygraph's GraphQL-first setup isn't a gimmick. Queries are precise, you only fetch what you need, and the schema is generated from your content model automatically. Content teams get a clean UI, and developers get proper typing out of the box.

The standout feature is Content Federation: you can pull external REST or GraphQL APIs into Hygraph and query them alongside your content through a single endpoint. That replaces a lot of duct-taped backend glue. Workflows, localization, roles, and staging all come built in.

If you're weighing it up (or trying to untangle an existing setup), talk to us, we've shipped several Hygraph builds and know where the edges are.

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GraphQL-first API architecture

Hygraph gives developers precise and predictable queries without over-fetching or duct-taping endpoints. If you're comfortable with GraphQL, go ahead with it.

Multi-region content delivery

Your content gets served from the closest region, so pages load fast everywhere without you having to think about infrastructure.

Fast geo-distributed responses

Because their CDN actually does its job, API calls resolve quickly across regions which is perfect for apps that can’t afford to wait on slow round-trips.

External API integration support

Hygraph’s content federation lets you pull in data from other APIs and treat everything like one unified system without any custom backend glue or microservice jungle.

Generous free tier offering

You can build real projects without paying a penny. It’s surprisingly capable for prototyping, small sites, or testing before you commit budget.

Automated webhook capabilities

All the updates trigger instantly with clean webhooks, which is great for syncing builds, triggering workflows, or piping data into other systems without manual overhead.

Common questions

Contentful to Hygraph migration FAQs

Answers to the most common questions about Contentful to Hygraph migration

Contentful has a Free tier with 10 users, 100K API calls per month, 25 content types, and 10,000 records. The Lite plan is $300/month for 20 users, 1M API calls, and 100GB CDN bandwidth. Enterprise is custom pricing with unlimited API calls and an uptime SLA of up to 99.99%. We've seen teams hit the free tier's API ceiling or content type cap fast, and the jump to Lite is often forced by a single limit rather than a feature need.

Yes. Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful in June 2026, expected to close later in Salesforce's fiscal year. Contentful says the platform, APIs, and support model stay the same for now, with deeper Agentforce integration on the roadmap. If you're making a long-term CMS bet, factor it in. Contentful's direction will increasingly follow Salesforce's enterprise priorities, which tends to mean enterprise pricing and enterprise roadmaps. It's one more reason teams ask us about a usage-based alternative like Sanity before they commit.

Contentful charges $300/month for its Lite plan with hard caps on API calls, seats, and content types. Sanity's pricing is usage-based, starting free and scaling with actual consumption. For most mid-size projects, Sanity ends up significantly cheaper. The real difference is that Sanity doesn't gate core features behind premium tiers the way Contentful does with roles, SSO, and content modelling limits.

Yes. We've migrated dozens of Contentful projects to Sanity. The structured content model in Contentful maps well to Sanity's schema, so most migrations are straightforward. Content, assets, references, and localized fields all transfer. Our typical migration takes 2-4 weeks depending on the number of content types and the complexity of your references. We handle frontend rewiring too if you're on Next.js or a similar framework.

It can be, but the costs get steep. Enterprise plans are custom-priced. From the contracts we've seen, smaller organisations start around $40,000 a year and full enterprise deals run past $180,000, with renewals climbing year on year. If you have deep pockets and your team already knows the platform, it works. If you're evaluating from scratch, we'd push you toward Sanity for enterprise use. You get equivalent API performance, better real-time editing, and a pricing model that doesn't penalize growth.

It's decent but not great. Hygraph's editor UI is clean and approachable for basic content updates, but the moment your content model gets complex (nested components, multiple locales, lots of reference fields), editors start feeling overwhelmed. The interface slows down with large datasets, and the GraphQL-native approach means the editorial experience is shaped by developer decisions more than in other headless CMS platforms. We've set up Hygraph for teams where editors managed well after proper onboarding, but it requires more hand-holding than something like Sanity's Studio, which was designed with editorial experience as a first-class priority.

Hygraph's Hobby plan is free with 3 seats, 1,000 content entries, 500K API operations, and 2 locales. The Growth plan is $199/month with 10 seats, 10,000 entries, 1M API operations, and 3 locales. Once you pass those limits, Growth charges automatic overages per block of API operations and per GB of asset traffic, so check the current rate on the pricing page before you sign. Enterprise is custom pricing and goes up to 200 seats, 1M+ entries, 50M+ API operations, and up to 80 locales, with SSO and custom roles on top. The catch is the same as it has always been. High-traffic sites burn through included operations fast, and Content Federation queries count against the limit too. Model your expected API usage before committing.

Three things come up on real projects. GraphQL is mandatory. There's no REST endpoint, so a REST-heavy stack means writing adapters or a BFF layer, and a team that hasn't used GraphQL faces a real ramp-up. The editor UI slows down as content grows. Big collections, dozens of fields, and double-digit locale counts make the dashboard sluggish for editors. And the paywall sits in awkward places. SSO, custom roles, and higher locale limits only arrive on Enterprise, so a mid-size team that wants proper access control jumps straight from $199/month to a sales call. None of these are dealbreakers if GraphQL is already your default and your content model stays disciplined, but they catch teams who picked Hygraph for the free tier and grew into the constraints.

Not sold on moving? Sometimes the platform is fine and the build is the problem. We also fix Contentful sites in place.

Contentful development agency

Projects migrated without a hitch

Join the growing list of successful migrations

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Roboto converged Slingshot Bio's WordPress and Shopify sites into one headless Shopify build on Next.js and Sanity, instrumented end to end and AI-ready.

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Tray.ai

Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform

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Mario Testino

From Sanity overages to instantaneous publishing, we brought Mario Testino into the fast lane, and did it in style.

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Get in touch

Tell us what you're building. We reply within one working day. Jono or someone on the team picks up every message personally.

We are the Contentful to Hygraph migration experts

How we migrate from Contentful to Hygraph

Access and gating audit

Rendering assessment and extraction

AI-assisted sanitization

Content-model design with the client

Transform and soft-migrate

Execute the real migration

Redirect mapping and throttled sitemap submission

Agentic-browser QA

Challenges with Contentful

Benefits of Hygraph

Common questions

Contentful to Hygraph migration FAQs

Answers to the most common questions about Contentful to Hygraph migration